anti iraq

Kurdish Warrior Women
Fearlessly fighting the evils of ISIS at every turn. Made especially fierce by the knowledge of what ISIS will do to them if they are captured. And made an especially effective due to the fact that ISIS fighters believe that if killed by a woman they will be chastised in the afterlife.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About 11,000 U.S. troops are serving in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, thousands more than it has previously stated.

The announcement by Pentagon officials at a news conference did not represent an increase in troops in Afghanistan and came after U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis expressed frustration with the method of counting U.S. troops in conflict zones.

The Pentagon said previously that there were roughly 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, under a cap set during President Barack Obama’s administration.

While the Pentagon said the move was a step in increasing transparency, it did not provide counts of U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria.

I agree… like the 14 women executed in Iraq last year for not wearing a hajib. Or those imprisoned for it in Saudi Arabia, or the myriad of other female rights violations due to sharia law involving just the Hijab… that’s before we look at who is FORCED by LAW to wear the Hijab…

that’s also before we enter into the various other womens/human rights violations, like getting stoned to death OR lashed AND imprisoned for getting RAPED… or the fact that women cant even drive in Saudi Arabia… or the 150 women executed in Iraq for refusing to convert… or the THOUSANDS of Iraqi and Syrian women who are currently being sold into sexual slavery…

The Chapel Hill Shooting is a tragedy by one bigot, lets not use it as an excuse to overlook the very real oppressions and murders happening EVERY DAY throughout the world. The greatest threat to and killer/abuser of Muslims is AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN other Muslims.

About Daenerys. The showrunners don´t see her as a saviour but as a tyrant. This is from the S6E9 script: "She allows the faintest hint of a smile. A smile that saids: My tiranny´s not ended, motherfucker. It´s only just begun". The problem here is not the writing but the fandom that blindly stan her. In GRRM words, the dragons are a metaphor for nukes and Meereen a metaphor for Irak. Daenerys is Truman and Bush lovechild and people don´t want to see it.

oh, wow i didn’t know that was in the script. that actually gives me more hope that dark dany will become a thing. i think the game of thrones fandom is the dumbest because they’re so blinded by this “badassery” that they believe dany is the hero and im just ??? how after ep4 people are still claiming she’s not the villain? im not saying it’s wrong to route for the villain but it was obv jaime was the protagonist while dany was the antagonist. and it’s clear that grrm didn’t write dany to be portrayed as this hero. he wrote a strong character who is grey. i think i remember hearing him compare the meereen invasion to the us-iraq invasion

someone asked about protests, arrests, and safety, and it seems like something to be shared more generally,“. also i’m interested in how other cities handle protest arrests, and share my perspective that the women’s march may be one of the last safe and easy protests for a long time.

i’m 33, older than a lot of you, so I was very involved in anti-bush protests and Iraq war protests here in Portland. I can ONLY speak for Portland, Oregon. I got arrested the night we started bombing Iraq. We were blocking an intersection and a bridge, and the arrests took like five or six hours; the protests had been going on for hours prior.

When we sat down to block the intersection and the bridge, we intended to get arrested. USUALLY before an action like that word spreads, "we’re doing such and such thing, if you don’t want to be arrested leave now.” At the last BLM protest I went to, they tried to block another bridge. They’d kind of waited way too long and allowed the cops to box them in, but the word still went out thru the protest “we’re gonna try this thing, if you don’t want get arrested stay back.”

Then you do the thing. Sit at the intersection or take the bridge. If you’re planning on going for a bridge or the freeway, you have to get to access points before the cops. That was the big mistake BLM made, too much marching around in circles before the cops closed in and we got stuck in the circle and access points to freeways and bridges were cut off.

In 2003 we did the thing (blocking the bridge) and we were allowed to do so, the cops had been hanging back for much of the march, unlike last summer where they closed things off and waited for people to come within hours.

Once you’re at the spot that’s clogging things up, at a certain point they show up with paddywagons, noise grenades, &c.

Depending on the city and what’s been happening in the city, they will also show up with pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets. The anti-bush protests I used to go to, PPB was always trigger happy with the bullets and pepper spray; at the first war protest they weren’t, for whatever reason. Not even noise grenades, they just let us sit and then started arresting us by midnight. so don’t take any response for granted.

OFTEN they will tell you to disperse or “___consequences___ will begin.” Consequences being either arrests or “dispersal tactics” tear gas, pepper spray, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, bean bag pellets.

HOWEVER they do not always do this here and i don’t even know how often they give warning in other cities.
After that big anti-war protest when we were blocking the bridges and got arrested and flooded the jails, they went back to being trigger happy with the pepper spray and rubber bullets. They also stopped announcing that they were going to start arresting people, and started tripping activists, attacking them, arresting people for “JAYWALKING” omfg. just picking us off from the sidelines, and as always people of colour and trans women were the first targets.

The night of the bridge sit in they told us that anyone who wanted to leave and not be arrested could, and then a trans woman tried to leave and was arrested. You can’t take cops at their word. That seems obvious but it can still be shocking to be at a protest, talking to people, and then suddenly have a face full of pepper spray. I cried the first time that happened, not just from pain but also because I was so shocked! no warning, just BAM, they attacked us.

If you get arrested over the weekend there’s a possibility that they’ll keep you in jail until Monday. That’s what they did to the trans woman they arrested even when the rest of us were allowed out within 36 hours.
Bear in mind that they may keep you in a paddy wagon for hours and hours, without access to a bathroom. I had to pee and it was agony.
When you get arrested, they don’t remove your cuffs. You share a cell with a bunch of other people and they can help you get your pants down :D
If you can get out of your zip ties, at least friggin pretend to keep them on or they’ll put you in metal cuffs (experience).

If you don’t want to get arrested, it is okay to try to walk away at any point. I don’t have backup care for my dogs and I try not to be arrested now because of that.
If you aren’t able to be peppersprayed or tear gassed or shot at (and like, those things can have really negative consequences on your health?) it is okay to try to walk away. There are and there will be other ways to resist.

I say “try to” because as that one woman showed, they don’t always let you, even if they said they would.

And finally, protests thinned out because Bush created “free speech zones”: specific areas where it was okay to gather but only in certain numbers, in other spaces gatherings could be arrested, and too large a gathering could be interrupted and arrested.

I think it’s likely we’re about to see a return to those conditions, and the women’s march, as racist, ableist, whorephobic, and mainstream white feminism as it is, may be one of the last big protests you can expect to attend without too many negative consequences for a while.

So whether or not you go out today is up to you and there is no right or wrong choice. Remember that resistance is ongoing, and it looks as much like feeding hungry people as it does like wearing a fuzzy goddamn cat hat (my dad texted me that he’s wearing a “pussy hat” in DC today and i died of shock. but i’m back.)

If you reblog pics, vids or posts about veterans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, complaining about their social problems but so proud to have fought there, just unfollow me.Those people willingly participated in imperialist slaughters. They deserve anything but support for their time served in the army killing innocents. If they love to brag about that dirty job they had, fuck them.The only good vets are deserters, the only good army is people’s army.

The greatest failure of the anti- Iraq war movement is that they were never anti-Iraq war.

Never.

The Iraq War was opposed not because it was immoral, not because it was illegal, not because we were lied to in order to justify it then the entire justification kept getting switched around then we were told we HAD to stay because of the new problems we caused by invading in the first place……

It was because AMERICANS were dying.

It was because a star football player died by “friendly fire” (and they later lied and stated an enemy combatant killed him).

It was because a grieving mother who son was killed in action camped outside Bush’s ranch.

But no one camped outside the Bush Ranch for the victims of Haditha. The world only paid just enough attention to Abu Gharib when the abuse became too obvious to ignore. No one cared to follow up on “Shoe Guy” - no one cared that Muntadhar al-Zaidi was tortured for that. We laughed it off.

And then people have the audacity to ask me why I fucking despise the military and this shit show of a country. Why I won’t stand for the allegiance or “support the troops” - a phrase just meaningless enough that I gotta defend myself with entire fucking essays on how YES I GET THAT military preys on poor people - I GREW UP IN THE NEIGHBORHOODS THEY PULLED FROM - but I will not congratulate you for volunteering to massacre Arabs. And I will never trust that a single American truly opposes war for the sake of ARAB lives - especially when Obama get darling treatment on this hellsite when he ramped up drone attacks that got kids SCARED OF BLUE SKIES - and a majority of Americans SUPPORT that.

The Map on top is the Ottoman Empire, the Map on the bottom is current ISIS holdings and affiliates… See a comparison? Proof that if not learned from history repeats itself. And proof that as history continues to prove that since its inception the Islamic faith continues in its attempts at world domination…